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Google’s first “Suncatcher” datacenter satellite has made it into space, but the company has cast doubt on whether its orbital ambitions can scale. As The Register reported last week, Project Suncatcher aims to test whether Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) can survive a launch and the harsh environment of space. The Big G hopes to validate theories that the limitless supply of solar energy available in space makes the cost of putting servers into orbit sensible. In its announcement of a successful Suncatcher launch, Google linked to its own peer-reviewed research about the endeavor – which outlines many thorny challenges that must be met to make orbital datacenters fly. The paper, titled “Toward a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design,” notes that SpaceX and others have suggested that orbital datacenters become viable when launch costs fall to $200/kg. Google’s researchers also note that SpaceX has managed to reduce the cost to launch a kilogram into orbit by 20 percent after every doubling of the cumulative mass it launched. If SpaceX can keep that up, which will mean launching 370,000 t additional cumulative mass, the equivalent of around 1,800 successful launches of its giant Starship rocket, and re-using components 100 times, Google thinks $200/kg is “plausible under reasonable assumptions.” Google doesn’t know the mass of its future datacenter satellites, but points to Starlink’s second-gen sats weighing 575kg and then compares the cost of sending a satellite into space with the price to power servers on Earth. “If launch costs reach ≲$200/kg, annualized cost per unit of power in space could be approximately comparable to terrestrial spend,” is Google’s conclusion. The paper’s calculations on future launch costs use data from SpaceX and other rocket operators. The other technologies needed to make datacenters in space remain largely theoretical. For example, the paper notes that existing network technologies probably aren’t suitable to link multiple satellites into functioning clusters. The need for rapid comms between satellites means Google’s plans require a design “significantly larger and entail much closer formation flight … than any previous or current satellite constellations.” Google also thinks that satellite design will need to evolve. “Our system design work to this point assumes a relatively conventional, discrete compute payload, satellite bus, thermal radiator, and solar panel design,” the paper states. “However, as has been seen in other industries (such as smartphones), massively scaled production motivates highly integrated designs (such as the system on chip, or SoC). Eventually, scaled space-based computing would similarly involve an integrated compute, radiator, and power design based on next-generation architectures, such as computational substrates based on neural cellular automata.” Google’s researchers also found “robust optical satellite-ground communications will also be critical for scaled operation but will necessitate overcoming challenges including atmospheric turbulence, high-speed relative motion errors, and precision beam tracking.” NASA’s TeraByte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) mission, which has demonstrated 200 Gbps ground-low-earth-orbit comms, is cited as a promising approach. Google’s researchers therefore concluded that realizing its space datacenter ambitions “will require sustained research, iterative refinement of our design, and the achievement of several critical future milestones.” ®
EU Copernicus report shows surface air temperatures from June to August were 2.5C above decadal average
The scorching heat that persistently baked western Europe this summer was the worst on record, a report has found, with more than half the continent seared by “very strong” heat stress that felt hotter than 38C.
Surface air temperatures in western Europe from June to August were 2.5C above the recent decadal average, according to an update from the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service on Friday, while milder but still deadly heat across the rest of the continent made the summer Europe’s third hottest on record.
Continue reading...Volodymyr Zelenskyy hails use of FP-7 tactical ballistic missile, which manufacturer says is being developed as an interceptor. What we know on day 1,682
Continue reading...Deployment underscores evolving complexity of Trump’s war against Iran as US midterm elections loom
The US military is dispatching a third aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, as President Donald Trump warned new strikes against Iran could be on the horizon.
The deployment, which includes a specialist amphibious attack group, underscores the rapidly evolving dynamic of Trump’s war against Iran as midterm elections in the US loom large.
Continue reading...If a chatbot prompt like ‘find Australian medicine statistics’ results in a website breach, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code
The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.
This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.
Continue reading...New York attorney general brought in by governor after recent questions raised over university’s 2024 investigation
Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, said Thursday she is appointing Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, as special prosecutor to investigate the alleged gang-rape at Cornell University.
“The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” Hochul said in a statement. “This action will ensure that the matter is fully and thoroughly investigated without conflict or bias, and handled independently with the rigor that this matter demands.”
Continue reading...Dispute over contentious Orange Order march will now go to a legal appeal on Monday after talks hosted by Northern Ireland secretary Chris Bryant end
Talks aimed at resolving the Drumcree parade dispute have broken up without agreement, with Northern Ireland secretary Chris Bryant describing the situation as being between a “rock and a hard place”.
A legal appeal over the contentious march is now scheduled for Monday, after unsuccessful late-night negotiations at Hillsborough castle with representatives from the Orange Order and Garvaghy Road residents on the fifth day of the standoff.
Continue reading...Four astronauts pulled up at International Space Station after eight-hour express flight led by Jessica Watkins
Four astronauts pulled up at the International Space Station on Thursday after launching on an eight-hour express that set a US speed record, and that created further history with the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit.
SpaceX launched commander Jessica Watkins and her crew for Nasa after a three-week delay to fix their Dragon capsule’s leaking fuel system. Thick clouds threatened all morning to halt the countdown but in the end, the skies cleared enough to allow for a safe liftoff.
Continue reading...Russia’s foreign ministry had called planned shows unacceptable due to rapper’s ‘glorification’ of Adolf Hitler
Two sold-out shows that Kanye West was due to play in Russia have been cancelled after weeks of confusion, organisers have confirmed.
The US rapper, who now goes by the name Ye, had been due to perform at the Gazprom Arena in St Petersburg on 10 and 11 October.
Press Association contributed to this report
Continue reading...
De zomer van 2026 heeft op tal van fronten sporen nagelaten. Gletsjers zijn kleiner dan ooit. En in het warme water van de oceaan verandert het zeeleven.
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Bruce66423 shares a report from The Telegraph: British police forces, including specialist units within the Metropolitan Police, have used Oxygen Forensics software to break into the phones of suspects during live investigations, public documents show. The Virginia-based company behind the software has been accused in the US of having hidden its Russian ownership to avoid sanctions, before it was awarded government contracts. Its American chief executive and a Russian national were arrested last week after a US investigation found the company had sought to hide its ownership in an alleged attempt to avoid sanctions and scrutiny.
[...] By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In December 2022, and in October 2023, Oxygen's chief executive told the US government that Oxygen Forensics had "no immediate or highest-level owner." By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In March, Mr Reiber allegedly told the US government that there had been no Russians involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was built. US prosecutors say this was false. If convicted, both Mr Reiber and Mr Davydov could face a sentence of 20 years in prison.
[...] By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In December 2022, and in October 2023, Oxygen's chief executive told the US government that Oxygen Forensics had "no immediate or highest-level owner." By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In March, Mr Reiber allegedly told the US government that there had been no Russians involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was built. US prosecutors say this was false. If convicted, both Mr Reiber and Mr Davydov could face a sentence of 20 years in prison.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cloudflare has launched two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, designed for structured yes/no, multiple-choice, and ranking tasks while also supporting images, video, and up to a 64K context window. Cloudflare says its models outperform TypeSafe's Jev on several benchmarks and can run locally from Hugging Face. The Register reports: For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According to Cloudflare, Clef uses specially post-trained, frozen versions of Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B for Clef and Clef-flash, respectively, with the Qwen backbone performing a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef is still fast - faster than Jev, to be fair - and scores choices in parallel after that prefill-only pass. It's not clear what Jev's underlying architecture is, as TypeSafe has kept that a secret.
As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company's own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster.
To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe's own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It's not limited to classifying text -- it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.
As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company's own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster.
To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe's own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It's not limited to classifying text -- it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.